“An industry group that licenses encryption technology for
DVDs filed a lawsuit in California on Tuesday accusing 500 Web site
administrators of giving away trade secrets in a scheme to override
encryption software that protects against DVD piracy….“
“One of the defendants, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly’s site at
2600.com, posted an article responding to the lawsuit. The article
expressed amazement at being sued for reporting that the DVD
encryption code had been cracked. According to the article, the Web
site “had nothing to do with the actual cracking of the
encryption….”
“The Norwegian group reportedly cracked the player code while
trying to reverse-engineer a software DVD player in order to create
one compatible with the Linux operating system. There is currently
no Linux-compatible software DVD player. The group then released
the DeCSS program, which will automatically break the encryption
code.”